Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
April 17, 2025
Key Points
- In a new court filing, the Trump administration says it will reissue an environmental impact statement that would allow the government to swap land with Resolution Copper at Oak Flat.
- The land swap was put on hold during the Biden administration and the case has been working its way through the courts. The Supreme Court is still deliberating whether to hear the case.
- Opponents say the court filing demonstrates that Trump doesn’t care about the land or the people who hold it sacred and only wants to hand Resolution Copper what it wants.
The Trump administration plans to reissue the final environmental impact statement for a long-delayed land swap that would hand over Oak Flat, a site considered sacred to Apache peoples and other Native peoples, to a copper mining company no earlier than June 17, according to a filing with the U.S. District Court of Arizona. The government issued the notice on April 17 even as the U.S. Supreme Court continues to deliberate over accepting a 4-year-old court case filed by grassroots group Apache Stronghold to prevent the 2,200-acre site from being obliterated by a copper mine. It’s the latest twist in a more than 20-year-old struggle over the fate of Oak Flat, between the Native communities who hold the site sacred and Resolution Copper, which wants access to one of the country’s remaining large copper deposits. For the leaders of the opposition, the court filing confirmed their worst fears.
“The U.S. government is rushing to give away our spiritual home before the courts can even rule — just like it’s rushed to erase Native people for generations,” said Apache Stronghold leader Wendsler Nosie. “This is the same violent pattern we have seen for centuries. We urge the Supreme Court to protect our spiritual lifeblood and give our sacred site the same protection given to the holiest churches, mosques, and synagogues throughout this country.”
[…]
Oak Flat, or Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, “the place where the Emory oak grows,” is at the heart of a dispute over what should happen to the land. In December 2014, Congress authorized the U.S. Forest Service to trade the 2,200-acre site, currently a campground about 60 miles east of Phoenix, for parcels of environmentally sensitive private land owned by Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of British-Australian mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP…To obtain the copper ore, Resolution would use a method known as block cave mining, in which tunnels are drilled beneath the ore body, and then collapsed, leaving the ore to be moved to a crushing facility. Eventually, the ground would subside, leaving behind a crater about 1,000 feet deep and nearly 2 miles across where Oak Flat and its religious and environmental significance stand.